The big picture
As you are introduced to all of the terminology and structure of how things are organized within API Connect, it could start to get a little overwhelming. So before diving into each piece of the setup that you will need to perform, let's take a look at the big picture and how things are organized. Hopefully, this will give you a high-level perspective on where each piece of the puzzle fits and provide some clarity on how you can structure your environment.
In Figure 3.1, you can see a very high-level overview of the main components and their hierarchy. You can see here that most of these components are required and you can have more than one defined. The one exception here is spaces. Spaces are not required but we will get into more detail on this in the Utilizing spaces section later in this chapter. Also, note that for simplicity, plans are not shown here as they will be covered in subsequent chapters: